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Chris Edwards

President Trump travelled last week to see damage from the North Carolina floods and Los Angeles wildfires. He suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) be reformed or terminated, and he signed an executive order creating a new council to review the agency.

Trump suggested “maybe getting rid of FEMA,” and he said, “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away and we pay directly.” The president’s inclinations are right, as I discuss in this study, but we should phase out FEMA and federal payments to the states for disasters. 

The American system of disaster response is not supposed to be a top-down structure imposed by Washington. Rather, the system is based on federalism, private charitable efforts, and mutual aid between states, cities, and utilities. Unfortunately, growing federal intervention is undermining this efficient, decentralized structure.

Here are 10 reasons why FEMA is not needed and sometimes detrimental.

Budget deficits. The federal government must cut spending to deal with massive budget deficits. Congress should repeal funding of activities that the states can fund themselves, including disaster response and reconstruction.
Federalism. The Congressional Research Service noted, “The United States takes a ‘bottom up’ approach to both managing and providing assistance, during and following a disaster.” State and local governments employ more than one million personnel in police, fire, and other first responder activities. State governors have wide-ranging responsibilities and powers during disasters, such as being able to order evacuations.
Role Not Unique. A bipartisan congressional report after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 noted that “many Americans … falsely viewed FEMA as some sort of national fire and rescue team,” but “FEMA is not a first responder agency.” Instead, FEMA’s main role is handing out aid, but states should cover disaster costs with their own rainy day funds.
Bad Incentives. Growing FEMA bailouts create a disincentive for states, businesses, and individuals to prepare for disasters. The states demand federal aid, and federal politicians put the costs on the national credit card. Growing federal intervention displaces more efficient state, local, and private efforts.
Infrastructure. The vast majority of the nation’s infrastructure is owned by state and local governments and the private sector, not by the federal government. It is the responsibility of infrastructure owners to know the risks, to fortify facilities, and to seek insurance coverage.
Top-down regulations. With federal funding of disaster response and rebuilding comes top-down regulations that encumber state and private efforts. FEMA’s bureaucratic barriers to private efforts during and after disasters are notorious, as with Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Private-Sector Response. In US history, disasters have generated huge outpourings of aid from individuals, businesses, churches, and charitable groups. The American Red Cross, for example, provides food, water, and temporary shelter after disasters. After recent flooding in North Carolina, Elon Musk sent more than 10,000 Starlink terminals, Walmart and Home Depot delivered food and supplies, and Taylor Swift donated $5 million.
Resource Sharing. A key feature of US disaster response is resource sharing between states, cities, utilities, and other groups. Standing agreements allow governments and utilities to rush teams and equipment to their neighbors hit by hurricanes, fires, and other disasters. Firefighting teams and equipment have poured into Los Angeles from dozens of states and Canada. Within a day or two of Helene hitting North Carolina, utility crews were arriving from up and down the East Coast.
Interstate Fairness. Each state has pros and cons that individuals and businesses trade off when considering where to locate. Florida and California have warmer climates than Michigan but higher risks of natural disasters. It is not fair for low-risk states to be continually paying through taxes for disasters in high-risk states, especially when the latter have not sufficiently prepared.
Crucial Federal Roles. While FEMA mainly hands out aid, other federal agencies hold critical skills and resources for disaster response. The Coast Guard’s search and rescue operations are vital during hurricanes. The National Guard under state command plays many crucial roles after disasters, such as medical care, law enforcement, and debris removal. The US Army supplied assets to aid the Helene and Milton efforts, and the Air Force flew search and rescue missions.

Congress should phase out FEMA aid for disaster preparedness, response, and relief. FEMA does perform some unique roles—such as flood mapping—and these can be moved to other agencies. Some FEMA activities, such as flood insurance, should be privatized.

In the wake of Katrina, Florida Governor Jeb Bush warned against strengthening federal powers at the expense of the states: “As the governor of a state that has been hit by seven hurricanes and two tropical storms in the past 13 months, I can say with certainty that federalizing emergency response to catastrophic events would be a disaster as bad as Hurricane Katrina.”

As such, the federal government should only fill roles where it can add value not provided by the states or private sector. In disasters, Bush noted, “If you federalize, all the innovation, creativity, and knowledge at the local level would subside.” That is true in many areas of state, local, and private activity.

This study elaborates on these ideas.

Neal McCluskey

On January 24, the US Department of Education announced that it was ending “Biden’s book ban hoax” by dismissing eleven active and six pending complaints with the Office of Civil Rights over public schools removing books from library shelves. Complainants alleged that the removals created a hostile environment for students. The department also eliminated the position of “book ban coordinator” created under the Biden administration. This pulls together two big problems in education: federal overreach and culture war.

The Trump administration is doing the correct federalism thing. The Constitution gives the feds no authority to govern education, leaving it to the people and the states. It does have civil rights enforcement power, but clashes of values—affirming children’s identities versus religious convictions, colorblindness versus ameliorating past wrongs—should not be subject to top-down imposition. Values differences need to be navigated by millions of freely acting people, both to maintain liberty and to reach social equilibria.

Of course, public schooling by its nature—government-established and run schools—does not allow people to freely interact. It requires that all pay for public schools governed by states and school boards that do the will of the political majority, or the minority with the most political power. This is a major reason that book battles are a constant presence. Americans are diverse, and public schools force them to engage in political struggles to decide who gets what they think is right and who does not.

Contentious issues are better handled at lower levels of government—state better than federal, local better than state. Smaller units are more likely to reflect the will of specific communities and they prevent bad decisions from being imposed on many people. But as long as there are any dissenters from what a school district decides, especially about deeply personal issues like gender, race, or religion, public schooling treats them unequally under the law.

The solution is school choice: funding following kids to educational options their families choose. Then all can seek what they think is best without imposing on others. At the federal level, Washington should generally stay out of culture war, which the Trump administration has done with book challenges but seems less inclined to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The latter is potentially at least as big a problem as dictating book policies—we will see how it plays out.

In a world where decent people constantly disagree, imposing one answer on everyone is almost always the wrong policy.

Colleen Hroncich

It’s National School Choice Week. But why do we have National School Choice Week and not National Grocery Store Choice Week or National Doctor Choice Week? Simple—education is the only sector that the government decided to take over and run this way. 

Horace Mann, an activist from Massachusetts in the mid-1800s, is considered the father of our public school system. Imagine if, instead of education, he thought the government should ensure all children had food. Further, imagine if he had decided the way to ensure they had food was to have the government create and run local grocery stores that were funded by taxpayers. The food at these stores would be “free” for all children who lived within a certain radius. People could vote on how to run and stock the store. But anyone who disagreed was stuck with what the majority decided unless they could afford to pay twice—once for the taxes that supported the store and again to shop at another store.

Similarly, imagine if medical care was Mann’s primary concern and he had pushed for government-run, taxpayer-funded clinics that people were assigned to. People could go for “free,” but they would have little say in how they were run other than by voting for clinic board members every few years. If they wanted other care, they would have to pay twice.

These examples sound absurd—especially in 2025. But are they any more absurd than assigning children to schools based on where they live instead of their interests and needs? We don’t handle preschool or college that way. Only education for kids aged 5–17. Perhaps the reason we don’t use that method in any other area of life is that it’s absurd.

National School Choice Week exists to help people understand that different educational environments work better for different kids. School choice programs let a portion of state funding follow students to a variety of educational options. Some, such as vouchers and tax credit scholarships, can only be used for private school tuition. Others, such as education savings accounts, can be used for expenses such as tutoring, curricula, and services for children with special needs in addition to tuition. 

There are now around 80 school choice programs on the books in 33 states plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. EdChoice estimates that around 1.2 million students are currently using these programs this school year. That’s encouraging. But it’s a drop in the bucket when you consider there are 54 million American kids in that age and nearly 60 percent of parents say they would choose something other than their assigned school if they could.

Most school choice programs were initially targeted to specific populations, such as students with special needs, students assigned to low-performing schools, or children from lower-income families. But there’s a growing trend towards universal eligibility for these programs as people increasingly realize it’s fairer. Plus, universal eligibility can result in better, more stable programs because they have a wider base of supporters and a greater diversity of users. Only four states are truly universal currently, in terms of eligibility, usage, and funding, but many more are heading that way.

If the government is going to mandate education funding and attendance, school choice is crucial for individual freedom. Parents shouldn’t be mandated to send their children to a government-run school or be forced to pay twice—once in taxes and once in tuition—if they choose another option. School choice programs help right that wrong by giving parents access to education dollars to use at those other options.

Perhaps one day, when no child is limited to an assigned school, the idea of National School Choice Week will seem as absurd as National Grocery Store Choice Week. 

Chris Edwards and Tad DeHaven

President Trump campaigned on moving tens of thousands of federal workers outside the “Washington Swamp.” He initiated such efforts in his first term, and now a bipartisan group of lawmakers has introduced a bill to support the process. The sponsors say that the “Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement (SWAMP)” Act would help “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. 

Moving agencies elsewhere would reduce DC traffic jams, but we’re skeptical it would save any money. And we’re concerned that such efforts would distract policymakers from the more important task of cutting agencies to tackle exploding debt. We would rather see a bill to “Shutter Wasteful Agencies and Most Programs.”

SWAMP Act co-sponsor Rep. Jared Golden (D‑ME) said, “Redistributing federal agencies and jobs around the country would bring the government closer to the people.” But that is the opposite sentiment of President Ronald Reagan, who quipped, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” We should shrink the government, not entangle it more closely in our lives. 

Federal relocation would impose new costs for logistics, leasing, and construction. Trump wants new buildings in beautiful classical designs. The SWAMP Act says that relocation costs would be offset by the proceeds of building sales, but government projects usually impose cost overruns and Congress would likely pass more funding for projects down the road. 

It would be more difficult for congressional committees and the White House to oversee agencies and meet with agency officials if they were spread across the country. And there would be new costs for flights and hotels for thousands of far-flung workers to attend meetings and hearings in DC. Federal decision-making would be slowed.

Moving agencies to distant cities could reduce workforce skillsets. Today, federal IT experts move between agencies within DC spreading knowledge around, while federal executives move around sharing best practices. That sort of cross-pollination would be lost if agencies were distributed and isolated.

Moving agencies closer to the people may have advantages, but it could also intensify the grip of special interests. If the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) moved to Iowa, for example, it would make that state’s economy even more dependent on farming and Iowa legislators more resistant to farm subsidy reforms.

A major relocation effort would create a new battlefield in Congress. The SWAMP Act calls for a competitive process for relocation decisions, but that is wishful thinking. The Congressional Research Service already tallies federal workers by district, and relocations would unleash members to fight for increases in their districts’ federal body count.

Trump moved some USDA and Bureau of Land Management workers out of DC, but Biden moved some of them back. Let’s say that Trump now moves USDA offices to Republican Iowa. Will the next Democratic president shift them over to, say, Illinois? Would Trump’s relocations launch endless and zero-sum migration drives of federal workers back and forth across the country?

We appreciate efforts to drain the DC swamp, but the way to do that is not by strategic withdrawal but by strategic shrinking. President Trump should eliminate the Department of Education as promised, not simply move it around.

Alex Nowrasteh

The Trump administration’s executive order of January 21, 2025, destroyed federal affirmative action in hiring and contracting and other race-based/DEI programs in institutions receiving federal funds and across the federal government. The administration also revoked several other executive orders that had mandated DEI policies throughout the federal government and inserted the government into contentious culture war issues. These changes are consistent with recommendations in the Cato Handbook on Executive Orders and Presidential Directives. They are also long overdue and consistent with libertarian principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.

Yet what is issued by executive order can be undone by executive order, and a future administration could reestablish many of these programs with the stroke of a pen. The costs of doing so will be high—to say nothing of the political opposition—but a future president could do it. However, there is a weak point in federal race-or-ethnicity-based policies that is so far largely unscathed by the Trump administration’s actions: data collection and classification.

The reestablishment of affirmative action or other race-based policies by a future administration would require data to be classified by relevant racial categories. If that future administration had to start from scratch in data collection, it would delay the implementation of such policies by years and significantly raise the costs of doing so. Further, government data on race and ethnicity provides evidence or even the impetus for different racial or ethnic groups to demand special benefits. 

In the past, the creation of new racial classifications has incentivized the formation of new race-based groups that then lobby for special treatment. Changing federal data collection and classification for race and ethnicity would reduce the supply of future race-based policies by raising the costs and decreasing demand by undermining the lobbies that rely on data or preventing their creation in the first place. 

Below are some additional actions that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Census Bureau, and the Trump administration could take to accomplish the long-term goal of undermining race and ethnicity-based policies by future administrations.

First, the OMB should revoke Revisions to OMB’s Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity (SPD-15 2024), which was adopted on March 29, 2024. The most pernicious actions in SPD-15 2024 were the creation of two new races (“minimum reporting category”) for Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) and “Hispanic or Latino.” The latter was formerly an ethnicity that respondents checked in addition to race. These two new races will soon appear in all federal data collection, like the Decennial Census and other surveys. The federal government shouldn’t create new broad racial categories for the reasons I describe here.

Second, the OMB should issue a revised SPD-15 that forbids collecting data by race or ethnicity unless explicitly required by statute. All such collection must end no later than 180 days after the revised SPD-15 is issued, and each agency should advise OMB within 45 days of any race or ethnicity data that it is required by statute to collect. This would also result in the Census Bureau immediately starting the process of removing race from the 2030 Decennial Census. They should begin that as soon as possible because the Census Bureau must advise Congress three years in advance of any change planned in the Decennial Census, which would be by April 1, 2027. 

The Census Bureau must also advise Congress two years in advance of all actual questions to be used, which would be due by April 1, 2028. This is more administratively complex than it seems, so the Trump administration should consider removing the current director of the Census Bureau and replacing him with somebody committed to pushing the process along rapidly. The current director has a five-year term expiring on January 5, 2027, but the president can fire him with a 60-day notice to Congress.

Third, the Census Bureau must withdraw its “Proposed Race/​Ethnicity Code List for the American Community Survey and the 2030 Census.” This proposed classification scheme adds hundreds of detailed racial subgroups.

Fourth, the Trump administration should issue an executive order directing the OMB, General Services Administration (GSA), and other relevant government bodies to identify every federal statute that mandates or authorizes the collection of race and ethnicity data by any federal government agency or imposes such requirements on state or local governments or private organizations. The executive order should force OMB, GSA, and other relevant government bodies to collect this information and report it to the administration within 90 days (or another feasible minimum period).

Fifth, the administration should consider which of these racial and ethnicity data collection mandates and authorizations can be eliminated via additional executive orders, regulatory changes, revocations or rescissions of agency memos, guidance, and other directives, and other agency actions. The administration should then issue an executive order to eliminate those data collection requirements outright, order agencies to do so, and terminate the personnel specialized in collecting those data. The last point is essential for dispersing the specialized knowledge required for racial and ethnic data collection by the government.

Sixth, the administration and Congress should work together to remove all statutory requirements for the collection of race and ethnicity data that exist in federal law, to bar federal agencies from collecting such data, and halt federal agencies from creating any racial or ethnic categories. Suppose Congress is reluctant to remove all the statutory requirements for data collection on race and ethnicity. In that case, Congress should at least remove as many of the requirements as possible and statutorily forbid the creation of new groups by future OMBs and other government agencies.

The new administration has made historic strides toward separating race and state. Taking the steps outlined above will further protect these reforms against any actions by future administrations that want to recreate race-based policies. The Trump administration and Congress should move as far down the above action list as possible. However, taking all the actions above would substantially increase the costs of reinstituting race-based policies and delay implementation for many years or longer.

Future presidents will be able to restart many of the race-and-ethnicity-based programs ended by the Trump administration so far. On a long enough timeline, even courts could change their minds and sanction future race-based discrimination by the government. However, the government requires data collected and classified along racial and ethnic lines to recreate such schemes. Furthermore, the existence of such data often creates demand for federal programs that discriminate by race or ethnicity. Nothing is permanent in government. 

Even if all the actions above were taken and Congress deleted all statutes that mandate and authorize the collection of racial and ethnic data, a future Congress could change it back. Still, the above actions are the best realistic chance for reducing that probability closest to zero. 

David J. Bier

After President Trump nearly eliminated admissions during his first term in office, President Biden rebuilt the US refugee process, admitting the highest number of refugees since the 1990s. In FY 2025, the United States was on pace to accept about 120,000 refugees, the most since the 1990s. About 37,000 were already admitted as of January 20. 

But on his first day in office, January 20, President Trump signed Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), which suspends refugee admissions. The executive order technically ordered the suspension to start at midnight on January 27 (Sunday night), but it started immediately.

Contents of the Executive Order on Refugees

Suspends indefinitely the USRAP program for refugees that enter the country legally after vetting abroad, starting January 27, 2025, at midnight (Sunday night);
Orders the creation of a process to allow states and local governments to have a veto over refugees resettling in their jurisdictions;
Orders DHS to create admission criteria to preserve “taxpayer resources for [US] citizens” and exclude anyone who cannot “assimilate”;
Orders DHS to determine within 90 days whether the refugee program should restart;
Rescinds President Biden’s 2021 executive order that ordered the creation of private sponsorship options and the rebuilding of the refugee program after Trump gutted it; and,
Allows for refugees to be exempted from the ban if approved by both the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Effects of the Order

The delayed effect of the refugee suspension never happened. All flights were immediately suspended on January 21. In addition, exemption authority appears to be a dead letter. The administration has not created any process to obtain or request an exemption. A subsequent memo has canceled all “previously scheduled travel” and suspended all referrals and case processing activities without any exemptions—meaning that nothing will happen to prepare anyone for departure right now or after the ban ends. 

We can safely predict that refugee admissions will be close to zero for at least the next 90 days and likely for the rest of the year.

During the last week, the administration canceled departures for 10,000 refugees who were cleared for travel, including 1,660 Afghans already cleared for resettlement. More than 10,000 other Afghans in Pakistan who were promised resettlement are stranded. This group includes minor children left behind in the evacuation. Their American veteran advocates are asking President Trump to reconsider.

The refugee ban primarily affects the following nationalities. Nearly 90 percent of refugees come from the following countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Syria, Burma (Myanmar), Somalia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Sudan, Eritrea, and Iraq. Notably, there are no more permanent nationality-specific exclusions yet, as there were when Trump suspended refugees in 2017. The order also does not limit the grounds for resettlement as did Trump’s 2020 proclamation. But the suspension is worldwide, and the order’s “assimilation” requirement to restart hints that these types of restrictions are coming. 

Although President Trump has previously voiced support for Christian refugees, Christians were also negatively affected by his first-term restrictions. The Trump administration reduced Christian refugee resettlement by 78 percent. President Biden increased Christian refugee admissions to the highest level on record. About half of all refugees were Christians in fiscal year 2024, meaning that most refugees excluded under the Trump refugee suspension are likely Christians as well.

Justification for the Order

This latest order does not repeat the absurdly weak national security justification of the 2017 refugee suspension. Cato’s research thoroughly rebutting the president’s assertion apparently had an effect. As my colleague Alex Nowrasteh has calculated, the annual chance of being killed in a refugee terrorism attack between 1975 and 2022 was one in 3.3 billion, with all deaths decades ago, before modern vetting. My research has identified only four refugees who were plausibly admitted as the result of a “vetting failure” and committed terrorism-related offenses of any kind from 2002 to 2016—none of whom killed anyone in the United States.

Instead, the president has inserted another absurdly weak claim: that the United States “lacks the ability to absorb large numbers of migrants, and in particular, refugees.” It cites “influxes of migrants” to New York City, Chicago, Denver, Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Springfield, Ohio, and Whitewater, Wisconsin. However, these locations are not significant destination cities for refugees who enter legally.

To the extent that local officials in those cities expressed concerns, they primarily related to illegal immigration: the migrants’ inability to obtain proper documents; work legally, and support themselves; issues with obtaining driver’s licenses; and limited vetting of migrants. However, none of these concerns apply to refugees, who are more thoroughly vetted than any category, receive legal documents, and can work immediately.

Refugees have a positive economic effect on the United States, as they fill critical roles in the US labor force. Economist Michael Clemens found that President Trump’s previous refugee suspension and its limited resumption:

costs the overall US economy today over $9.1 billion per year ($30,962 per missing refugee per year, on average) and costs public coffers at all levels of government over $2.0 billion per year ($6,844 per missing refugee per year, on average) net of public expenses

In 2017, the White House ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to produce a rigorous accounting of the fiscal effects of refugees and asylees in the United States. That study revealed that the net fiscal effect of the average refugee or asylee since 1990 was positive. Although the White House blocked the official publication of this report, it was leaked to the New York Times. Furthermore, the report was updated last year to include data through 2022. The update found that the “net fiscal impact of refugees and asylees was positive over the 15-year period, amounting to $123.8 billion” from 2005 to 2019.

Even more significantly, the president has suspended resettlement even under the private refugee sponsorship programs known as Welcome Corps, under which groups of Americans, US employers, and US universities could raise the money necessary to resettle the refugees in the United States. By April 2024, in just the first three months of the program, more than 65,000 Americans had signed up to sponsor someone. This makes his assertions of the lack of capacity even more dubious than if he had adopted this justification in 2017.

President Trump should restart the refugee program. At a minimum, he should reinstate Welcome Corps and create a clear process to apply for an exemption from the suspension. 

Jeffrey A. Singer

On January 24, the press reported that the Trump Food and Drug Administration has withdrawn its proposed ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. The agency did not issue a statement on the withdrawal. The Biden FDA originally proposed the ban in April 2021.

This action comes after the Biden administration delayed implementing the proposal in March 2024. In April 2024, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Bacerra stated his department needed “significantly more time” to consider public comments and concerns about a menthol tobacco ban. Biden’s Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, urged the FDA to end the delay and impose the ban in November 2024.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2020, 81 percent of Black smokers preferred menthol-flavored cigarettes. Numerous civil liberties organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, had opposed the menthol ban, concerned that menthol bans might exacerbate racial and ethnic disparities in law enforcement and within the criminal justice system.

In a May 2022 Orange County Register column warning a ban would ignite a black market in menthols, I wrote:

Remember Eric Garner? New York City’s exorbitant taxes on cigarette packages generated an underground market in untaxed individual cigarettes, called “loosies.” In 2014, police infamously encountered 43-​year-​old Eric Garner selling loosies on a street corner, and a policeman’s chokehold led to his death as he repeated “I can’t breathe.” And this happened without a menthol ban. With menthol cigarettes more prevalent among Black and Hispanic Americans, expect police to focus their attention on minority communities. This might make inequities in criminal justice even worse.

That same month, I submitted written comments to the FDA opposing the proposed ban. I included evidence that menthol cigarette smokers consume fewer cigarettes than regular cigarette smokers and may have a slightly lower risk of getting lung cancer.

President Trump did not sign an executive order to withdraw the menthol ban proposal. The FDA withdrew the proposed ban through an administrative action. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs formally documented the proposal’s withdrawal on January 21, 2025.

The Trump FDA’s withdrawal of the menthol ban proposal strikes an essential balance between health concerns and individual freedoms. It is rare but refreshing for a government agency to appear to consider the unintended consequences of its actions.

Travis Fisher and Dominik Lett

On January 20, his first day back in office, President Trump declared a national energy emergency through an executive order aimed at drastically increasing domestic energy production and building additional infrastructure. While framed as a response to energy supply challenges, this order highlights the dangers of normalizing emergency governance, where temporary, rarely-used powers become regular tools to make long-term policy decisions. Trump’s actions risk repeating some of the same presidential overreaches of the Biden era, which relied heavily on the executive branch to reshape energy policy.

What’s in the Order?

The executive order endows federal agencies with sweeping emergency powers to fast-track energy infrastructure projects and bypass environmental regulations, including by invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) and eminent domain. The stated goal is to address “inadequate energy supply and infrastructure,” which the administration blames on policies from prior administrations. Although we are sympathetic to the Trump administration’s problem statement, fighting executive overreach with more of the same is a losing strategy in the long run.

A key provision of the order is its invocation of the DPA, a wartime authority that empowers the president to regulate and subsidize “critical materials and goods” needed for national defense. As former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R‑TX) once said, “The Defense Production Act is probably the most powerful and potentially dangerous piece of American law. It gives the president extraordinary powers.” Under Trump’s order, the DPA could be used to commandeer energy resources by forcing private businesses to accept certain contracts, blocking mergers and acquisitions, and even directly subsidizing energy projects. These actions, while intended to bolster energy infrastructure, would lead to wasteful government spending and distortions in energy markets, shifting substantial costs onto taxpayers.

Additionally, the order empowers agencies to investigate exercising eminent domain “to facilitate the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, and generation of domestic energy resources.” This could accelerate the construction of pipelines, refineries, and transmission lines. But it comes at the cost of individual property rights that are foundational to free markets, prosperity, and liberty. Moreover, eminent domain invites political corruption, where public funds may be intentionally directed to help some private corporate energy interests over others.

As one example, could the Trump administration order the construction of a natural gas pipeline through the state of New York—which has long rejected hydrocarbon infrastructure projects—into energy-starved New England? Possibly. Section 4 of the executive order specifically mentions the Clean Water Act, which is the legal authority used by the state of New York to reject pipeline projects.

Another example that should strike fear into the heart of electricity market participants is the prospect of using Section 202c of the Federal Power Act to keep power plants running despite regulatory restrictions under the Clean Air Act. That authority is vested with the Department of Energy and has been used sparingly in cases of clear emergencies but could be applied—we think erroneously and in bad faith—in a blanket fashion at the national level. 

The Broader Cost of Emergency Governance

Trump’s national energy emergency is part of a troubling pattern in modern governance: an increasing reliance on emergency powers to justify large-scale policy shifts. Since Congress passed the National Emergencies Act of 1976, the US has seen a steady rise in the rule by emergency, with more than forty emergencies ongoing today. These emergencies, originally intended to address immediate and unforeseen crises, now persist for decades, becoming entrenched features of federal policy with significant fiscal costs.

Trump’s energy emergency continues this trend, using emergency authorities to bypass congressional approval. Tools like the DPA and eminent domain concentrate immense power in the executive branch, enabling rapid spending on infrastructure projects without rigorous cost-benefit analysis or oversight.

This growing reliance on emergency declarations also fuels a political pendulum effect, with each administration invoking emergency powers to advance ideologically opposed agendas. President Biden faced calls to declare a climate emergency to restrict fossil fuel production, while Trump’s energy emergency prioritizes a fossil fuel-driven infrastructure boom (the companion executive order Unleashing American Energy urges “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical minerals, and nuclear energy resources”). These tit-for-tat declarations distort the market and bypass constitutional checks and balances.

While energy security is a valid concern in the current policy environment, the use of emergency declarations as a workaround for congressional deliberation deepens political polarization and sets a bad precedent for future administrations. What’s to stop the next Democratic administration from one-upping these executive orders as Trump has done immediately on the heels of the Biden administration? 

The lesson here is simple. Centralized planning—whether through a leftist subsidy for climate security or a conservative emergency mandate for energy security—undermines the innovation and efficiency that free markets provide.

A Better Path Forward

To address energy security responsibly, the administration must work with Congress to pursue durable, market-oriented reforms that balance immediate needs with long-term goals by embracing markets. The new Republican trifecta must repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s massive energy subsidy program, for example, but suspending offshore wind leasing via executive action is a poor substitute for subsidy reform and reinforces the Biden team’s brinksmanship in banning offshore oil and gas leases. 

Only an open, competitive energy market, free from the shifting political priorities of executive or other power, will best serve Americans over the long term. So long as the government is involved in making energy policy, it should follow principles of transparency, cost discipline, and democratic accountability—all things that the emergency order runs counter to.

Trying to build cost-effective, long-lived American energy infrastructure under a set of rules that change every four years is absurd. A political regime of emergency authority ping pong is a game no one wins. If we want the energy sector to thrive, we need a policy environment where markets determine outcomes rather than top-down mandates or fleeting political whims.

Norbert Michel

Ever since the November election, it appeared the new Trump administration would take a decidedly pro-crypto stance. The president’s January 23 executive order on digital assets seems to confirm it.

The order’s goal is to “promote United States leadership in digital assets and financial technology while protecting economic liberty.” Nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps most encouraging is that the administration now has an explicit goal to protect and promote “the ability of individual citizens and private-sector entities alike to access and use for lawful purposes open public blockchain networks without persecution.” For context, that goal includes “the ability to develop and deploy software, to participate in mining and validating, to transact with other persons without unlawful censorship, and to maintain self-custody of digital assets.”

It remains to be seen exactly how this plays out, but these explicit statements represent a huge positive change. They look very much like a 180-degree reversal in the executive branch’s view toward crypto, and it’s very hard not to take that as a good sign.

Another good sign is that the order uses the same definition for blockchain that the US House of Representatives used in the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act. That language identifies a required attribute of the blockchain as being “composed of source code that is publicly available.” That language suggests a move toward promoting open and permissionless blockchains, and that’s a good sign too.

The order also takes a stance on prohibiting a central bank digital currency, and that’s a great sign.

Finally, the order establishes a working group to help with all the heavy lifting that still needs to be done. The working group will make recommendations for regulatory and legislative proposals for digital assets, including stablecoins. And the working group does not include any of the banking agencies, where some of the strongest resistance to innovation through financial technology has resided.

There’s a long way to go, but this executive order is a great start for the new administration. 

Colleen Hroncich

Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are helping to transform the education landscape in Arizona. Homeschool mom Marta MacBan, founder of Sonoran Learning Collective north of Phoenix, has seen this firsthand. “It’s been really great in Arizona because it really does give families just so many options to meet their students’ needs,” she says, adding that it’s helped fuel the growth of microschools.

Like many parents, Marta’s first foray into teaching happened when schools were shut down during COVID-19. Her daughter was in kindergarten, and Zoom school wasn’t working. A homeschooling friend suggested they try using her curriculum for the rest of the year. “I ended up using it for the remainder of the year, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is actually really great. I can do this,’” she recalls. “It was just a little bit eye-opening to see that I was able to teach my daughter at home.”

She and that friend created a pandemic pod with five families who met at the friend’s house. The friend was in the process of opening a cottage school modeled after Highlands Latin School in Kentucky and invited Marta to join her. “That next year, which was the 2021–22 school year, we launched Highlands Latin Cottage School, which was a one-day-a-week school. We started with 12 kids who came and learned together in the classroom, and then the rest was at home,” says Marta. “It grew pretty quickly. We went from 12 kids the first year to, I think, we had 46 the second year.” 

During that time, Marta thinks there was a shift in how parents were thinking about education. “Parents were seeing some things in the public system that were exposed and just also appreciating the time with their kids and realizing that they want to play a part in their child’s education,” she says. Marta experienced her own shifts as well, going from narrowly thinking education had to happen in a specific building by a certified teacher to realizing there are many places and ways to learn.

After four years of homeschooling, including three with Highlands Latin, she realized she wanted to do something a little different with her children. While she loved the Highlands Latin model, it was focused on one curriculum, and Marta wanted to explore some other areas for her daughter. So she joined the KaiPod Catalyst program and launched Sonoran last fall with 10 students and one other teacher.

The emphasis at Sonoran is individualized learning, which is a shift from what she expected going into it. She has two classrooms—upper elementary (4th and 5th grade) and lower elementary (2nd and 3rd grade)—because she happened to have pretty even numbers for those age ranges. She focuses on core academic subjects because there are a lot of options for enrichment and extracurricular activities in the area. “But there weren’t many that offer actual core subjects, and that was an area that a lot of parents, especially as the kids get older, really need help in,” Marta explains. “So we do math, English language arts—you know, grammar, spelling, literature—and then science and social studies.”

They have recess, breaks, and some classes all together; for example, last semester they did the science unit together. For other classes, they stay separate to allow each to work at a different level. For math in particular, each student can work at his or her own pace. “There are five students in the room using the same curriculum, but they’re all at different levels, and they can go at their pace. So one student might be in the 3rd grade math book on Lesson 75 and one might be in the 3rd grade math on Lesson 56. And that’s fine,” she says. “It’s more focused on ‘what do we want them to achieve and how do they learn’ instead of ‘we need to get through this book and it doesn’t matter if they know it or not.’”

As a hybrid program, Sonoran classes are held in person Mondays through Wednesdays, and students learn at home the other days. Each week, Marta updates the students’ progress on an app so parents can see what they’ve done and what they should work on for the following week. She says parents really like the support and accountability they get from those updates so they know what the students should be doing for the home days. 

In addition to running Sonoran, Marta loves helping others understand the changing education landscape because she knows it can be overwhelming. “I’m really passionate about helping families navigate that and say ‘OK, what are you looking for? What are your needs?’ Just kind of helping them just ease that anxiety with the overload,” she says.

Marta says it’s been exciting to see the change in school choice and the attitudes people have about it. She notes it wasn’t long ago that if you said you were homeschooled, people thought you were weird, or if you went to an alternative school, that meant you were a failure. 

“But now it’s totally fine. It’s not uncommon for when you ask a child, ‘Where do you go to school?’ You can have any kind of different answer and it’s totally fine. It’s now the norm that there are all these different options and opportunities,” she says. “Our society is just different now than it was, and I think that’s been cool.”